[sir_bearington]

> That was the past. The dynamics have changed, and renewables are much more competitive now. Nobody is building more nuclear right now.

Uh... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#/media/File:Nucl...

> Here's what I expect to happen today with a carbon tax: it'll kill fossil fuels, and give a huge boost to renewables. Nuclear won't benefit nearly as much, because renewables can sell each GW/h cheaper and are much faster and easier to build.

This is overly simplistic. Eliminating carbon emissions is not just about generating more clean energy. It's about replacing the energy that fossil fuels currently provide. It's hard to do that with intermittent sources.

> At that point you can subsidize nuclear, heavily tax renewables, or subsidize storage. My view is that the last one is the long term solution because nuclear won't outcompete renewables long term.

Perhaps, if we have a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage. But unless that happens, we'll end up building nuclear power to fulfill off-peak demand. And since nuclear power is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it does to run part of the time it'll just make the bulk of renewables redundant.

If you have 100 GW of solar solar panels plus nuclear plants generating 100 GW for nighttime use, it's just as cheap to run the nuclear plants 24/7 and ditch the solar panels.

[dale_glass]

That map isn't particularly meaningful. Sure, stuff is being built technically. But as far as I know, the main places where it's being done for real are China and India.

The UK for instance has one powerplant actually in construction and it already got a bad rap because it's a bad deal economically.

Besides that, I think you're missing my point. My point is that you have to deal with reality, and reality doesn't really align with the way you want things to work. For instance, you said:

"So why not just build the nuclear plants and skip the renewables?"

My question is: "Who 'we'"? In a lot of countries, there's no "we" that applies. There's a government that sets the rules, and private enterprise that builds the plants. If "we" is the government, then they don't build powerplants themselves. They may allow them to be built, but a company still has to want to.

And if "we" is the commmercial enterprise, then nuclear is far too big for anybody to build it out of sheer altruism or good PR. That's big money territory and it must make a profit.

If you simply impose a carbon tax, private enterprise will just go and build solar. We have no storage? Those companies won't care. It's not their problem to solve. They'll build whatever makes the most money, which is almost definitely not nuclear.

If you want nuclear to happen you'll have to force it somehow, and I'm not seeing any particularly attractive ways of doing so. You want to be the politician who runs on a campaign of forbidding or heavily taxing solar and wind at the same time as dumping billions of $ into nuclear construction? Yeah, that'll go great, I'm sure.

[sir_bearington]

> If you simply impose a carbon tax, private enterprise will just go and build solar.

Depends on how high the carbon tax is. Put it at a high enough rate that the country needs to go 100% carbon-free and people will build nuclear because that's the only solution (besides geographically limited things like geothermal and hydro) that can feasibly bring carbon emissions to zero.

Renewables are cheap when going from a mostly fossil fuel grid to a 50/50 renewable and fossil fuel grid. But bringing fossil fuels below 50% without the help of nuclear or hydroelectricity is extremely difficult. Any plan to do so basically assumes that some future breakthrough will make storage cost a fraction of what it does today.

> We have no storage? Those companies won't care. It's not their problem to solve.

Yeah, that's why there's no plan to actually decarbonize with renewables.

And if we actually want to stop climate change, yes it absolutely a problem that needs to be solved.

> If you want nuclear to happen you'll have to force it somehow, and I'm not seeing any particularly attractive ways of doing so. You want to be the politician who runs on a campaign of forbidding or heavily taxing solar and wind at the same time as dumping billions of $ into nuclear construction? Yeah, that'll go great, I'm sure.

Pass a carbon tax such that building a nuclear plant is less expensive than running solar during the day and natural gas at night. Renewables depend on fossil fuels until we make a breakthrough in storage.

[dale_glass]

I think you're still missing what I'm saying. Yes, running a grid 100% on renewables is probably extremely difficult. Yes, nuclear may be the optimal way forward today. But I still think the most likely outcome is the renewable grid anyway.

Why? Because there's no "we". There's no central planning. What there is is a bunch of self-interested parties that don't care about the entirety of the problem. Everybody will go with what makes the most sense to them, the result will be suboptimal, and then once things go wrong the country will have to fix the problems somehow.

Your plan may make sense in China where the government can indeed implement a central plan, costs and opinions be damned. But it seems extremely unlikely to happen in most western democracies because the politics won't support it.

"Yeah, that's why there's no plan to actually decarbonize with renewables."

What I'm trying to say is that there's no global plan whatsoever. In most countries we don't have the ability to implement any kind of comprehensive central policy. We have multiple parties that can nudge things in one direction or another but none of which has full control over what happens.

"Pass a carbon tax such that building a nuclear plant is less expensive than running solar during the day and natural gas at night."

But the problem is that there's no single party in charge of solving that problem. You pass a carbon tax. Fossil fuels die. Companies will build solar, because it makes them money. Companies won't build nuclear because it's expensive to build and solar is eating their lunch. The powerplant building company cares nothing about the economics of keeping the country powered 24/7, they care about the economics of building their plant. If their business model works okay while selling nothing at night, then it works, and that's that.

Then we'll get blackouts at night, solar companies will shrug "not our problem", and the government will have to scramble to find a solution.

[sir_bearington]

> The powerplant building company cares nothing about the economics of keeping the country powered 24/7, they care about the economics of building their plant. If their business model works okay while selling nothing at night, then it works, and that's that

It doesn't work like that.

Contrary to your repeated insistence that there is no central planning, there is indeed extensive government planning in electrical grids. You can't just say "we'll only give you power during X hours of the day" to your customers. Likewise, you can't just tell customers who don't live near a dam that they won't be getting electricity when it isn't windy.

Wholesalers can do this, because they sell to other grid companies who actually sell to consumers. But no, if we have solar and wind and these sources aren't producing enough electricity then they have to burn gas and pay the carbon taxes. And if the carbon taxes are high enough, it's less expensive to build nuclear plants that emit no carbon and don't suffer from intermittency.

[fulafel]

I think COVID-19 has shown that most countries with multi party systems can implement comprehensive policies centrally.

[dale_glass]

That's an interesting counter-argument but I don't think it works very well. In fact that's pretty much how I expect things with nuclear to go.

Where you have strong central government control -- there you can have comprehensive plans. Where you don't, you can't.

Which is why Covid-19 is a clusterfuck in the US -- because the US doesn't have strong enough central control (and heck, Trump didn't care anyway). Even with Biden at the helm his power is limited and he has to convince the various states to act, and Congress hangs in a very delicate balance.

Also, the fact that a country can do one thing doesn't mean it necessarily can do another. That you have centralized healthcare and can command a country-wide response to covid-19 doesn't mean you have centralized power generation and can command a country-wide decarbonization.

Sure, things can be restructured, laws can be passed, power generation can be nationalized, but none of that is quick nor easy and by no means guaranteed to happen even if it would result in the best outcomes.

Plus as far as the public is concerned, covid-19 is a lot more understandable and immediate of a concern. Climate change is more of a vague and slow moving threat, and that makes it much harder to do dramatic things in response.